Bloomberg came up with a report of how the major indexes around the world did for the first three months of 2009. Along with that are biggest winners and losers. No surprises that most of the losers are financials.
DOW JONES
Tech stocks sure did stage a comeback with IBM and Intel gaining the most in the 1st quarter of the year. And there’s no surprise that even with multiple bailouts, an un-restructured automotive company, and faltering credit rating, Citigroup, BofA, GM and GE still had so much to lose. A similar story is seen with S&P 500 with some of the smaller banks giving up still a lot of their values. Sun Microsystems’ surge might have been a result of the talks between the company and IBM.
S&P 500
FTSE 100
In the UK, mining companies seem to be leading the winners side. Fresnillo is a mining company, which is the second biggest producer of silver and Mexico’s biggest producer of gold. With the investor’s flight to safety, silver has been one commodity overshadowed by gold despite its outperformance. While gold has become a standard investment for the risk-averse, silver has seen a bigger surge in price, which might explain the 100% increase in value of the company. Kazakhmys is another mining company whose main operations are situated in Kazakhstan with a headquarter in London. Rio Tinto’s rise may have been brought about by the financing from China’s Chinalco despite the collapse of talks with BHP Billiton. At the bottom of the graph is RBS, with HSBC and Lloyds not far behind.
CAC 40
The French stocks saw smaller improvements with automaker Peugeot recovering less than 25% of its value while Germany tells a different story as Deutsche Bank leads with an even smaller gain. A fellow bank, Commerzbank, had the worst performance.
DAX
